Like everyday, Ahmed was going back home after a long day at work. Since college and since he started his job as a government employee in 2004, he did not have any problem in transportation. Most Iraqi middle and working class people use government buses and private minibuses for their transportation.Lined up near the old non-functional traffic lights in Bab al-Muadham district in central Baghdad, KIA minibuses were empty. Angry people, including Ahmed, argued with the drivers to let them in. “No one will go in before being searched,” one driver told the mob. Men and women disagreed first but later surrendered to the driver’s insistence to save their lives. There might be a terrorist putting on an explosive belt or carrying a bag with a bomb ready to cut the people’s body into pieces.
As it is known for everyone, Iraqis’ life has changed from bad to worse since the U.S.-led war. Now, even buses become one of the hundred things Iraqis fear. Distrust becomes something stuck with Iraqis wherever they go. Everyone started suspecting each other. If someone parks a car in the street, nearby shop or house owners ask him to take it away. It may be a car bomb.
Ahmed started to be worried all the time. Like all Iraqis, he is unsafe at all. “Wherever I go, I feel I am going to die. Even going to work became as hard as getting a job,” he told me once.
Today, a bomb planted inside a minibus exploded in Baghdad's Shiite Sadr City neighborhood, killing at least two people and wounding six.
In addition to bombs put inside the buses, car bombs are also fatal and one of the daily threats people may face. In last August, at least 43 people died and 76 were wounded in triple car bomb explosions in central Baghdad. Two of the blasts went off within 10 minutes of each other at the busy Nahdha bus station. The third blast happened on the road to a nearby hospital, Kindi, some 15 minutes later, just as victims of the first two attacks were being brought in.
On December 08, 2005, a suicide bomber boarded a packed bus as it was pulling out of the same bus station, Nahdha, and detonated an explosive belt, killing at least 30 civilians, mostly women and children. Police said the death toll was especially high because the blast triggered secondary explosions in gas cylinders stored at a nearby food stall. At least 25 people were wounded in the attack.
Last Tuesday, a bomb hidden in a minibus exploded near one of the offices of the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in Kamaliya neighborhood in eastern Baghdad, killing two civilians and wounding three, police said.
Despite the above mentioned incidents, there are no serious efforts to put an end to this phenomenon. Security forces should be guarding the entrances and exits of the public bus stations to prevent any such attacks.
However, people always try to have a better life by tipping off the security forces of any suspected thing. Today, a group of people noticed an anonymous car parked inside the main bus station in Baghdad's famous Shiite neighborhood of Kadhimiya. They called the police who came hurriedly to see if the vehicle was a car bomb or not. Bravely, they defused the bomb they found in it and saved dozens of innocents’ lives.
